Author: Robert Fry

Well, we have had a wet couple of days and it looks like it will continue for a few more. Hoping, however, that the water will recede a bit. Here is a link to a quick little video of the flooding. Groundhog Day Flood–Huntington Beach

These posts will include some information relative to Symphony 4 website design. Much of what you will find here will be snippets of code or instructions on how to create or use the various tools that are part of Symphony 4.

The first tidbit deals with creating a symfony 4 website-skeleton:

To create a new project run the following command:

composer create-project symfony/website-skeleton my_realm

“my_realm” is the new project or website.
Next Step: change to the new directory my_realm

cd my_realm

Next Step you will be initializing the directory for git. So Run:

git init
git add .
git commit -m “init”

Next: you will want the development server to run, so type in the next command: Run:

composer require server --dev

Once you have installed the server, run the following command:

bin/console server:run

From here open a browser and go to the website: http://localhost:8000 or 127.0.0.1:8000
This will let you view the page in your browser.

Next we will create a controller. To do this you will need to run the following command:

bin/console make:controller

Once you type in the command, it will ask you to name the controller. Pick any name that sounds good to you. “MainController,” “DefaultController,” “ClientController”–Just make sure you place the name with the word controller. It can be found in the /src/controller directory.

Next we will be setting up the mysql database by opening the .env file and plugging in the mysql user and database information. Then run the command below.

bin/console doctrine:database:create

Next create an entity
and fill in the fields.

bin/console make:entity

Once the entity has been named and the fields created, then you will need to migrate the new schema by using the following command:

Nativity at HomeThis last Christmas we had the opportunity to share Sharon Hepworth’s 80th birthday with her. Her birthday has always fallen on Christmas day, so she seldom has enjoyed havening a birthday on that same day. It was our hope to get as many together to celebrate this grand occasion with her, so we sent out messages, made assignments, and came together to celebrate with her. Here are a couple of pictures and movies to share with everyone.
We held the party at Sharon’s Ward Building. We were fortunate enough to have people who helped with all the decorating, cooking, and setup. Everyone had a great time.

Here is a link to a video made for Sharon Hepworth’s 80th Birthday. Enjoy!!!!

On January 14, 2019 Tambra and I went to Dallas, Texas to help out with Chris and Camille’s newest arrival, Luke Christopher Fry, born on December 15, 2018. He arrived at 7:04 PM and weighed in at 7lb 8oz and 21 inches long. Here are some pictures of our time there.

The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing about losing things in the process of copying and pasting.

What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…

… like this one, which is right aligned.

Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.

If your theme supports it, you’ll see the “wide” button on the image toolbar. Give it a try.

Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.

The Inserter Tool

Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.

Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:

Text & Headings

Images & Videos

Galleries

Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.

Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.

And Lists like this one of course 🙂

Visual Editing

A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:

The editor will endeavor to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.

Matt Mullenweg, 2017

The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.

Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.

You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.

Media Rich

If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:

Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.

The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.

Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:

https://vimeo.com/22439234

You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:

Code is Poetry

The WordPress community

If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.